ENVIRONMENT
Laura Hackett
Islands of Abandonment
Life in the Post-Human
Landscape by Cal Flyn
Wm Collins £16.99 pp376
The island of Swona in
Orkney, Scotland, was a tiny
community of nine families.
In 1974 its two remaining
inhabitants left, letting loose
their herd of cattle, hoping
they would fend for
themselves until they
returned. But they never did.
When Cal Flyn spent a night
on the island, she was told to
sleep inside the abandoned
cottage (not a tent) and lock
the door. The cattle might
trample her or break in. In
fact they were defensive in
Flyn’s presence, but the feral
unlikely natural haven, to
emptied-out neighbourhoods
in Detroit. Her intrepid
adventures have been rightly
rewarded with a spot on the
Baillie Gifford prize shortlist.
When nature does return,
the results are not always
positive. In the abandoned
First World War battlefields ofdangerous too — one crab is
enough to give you cancer.
For the area’s impoverished
immigrant community, that is
often a risk worth taking.
Given its subject matter
— when humans abandon a
place, it is rarely for a good
reason — this book could have
been relentlessly negative. But
Flyn’s lyricism, combined
with her awe at the power of
nature to survive in the worst
of conditions, makes for a
more edifying experience.
She worries that her positivity
could inadvertently condone
acts of eco-vandalism — if
nature will always prevail,
why not just carry on as we
are? — but that’s not the case.
Flyn’s natural descriptions are
enough to propel you to
action: on Estonian farms,
abandoned after the fall of the
Soviet Union, she finds “bare
rowans bearing handfuls of
bright-flashing berries; slim
and silk-skinned birches and
aspens, their leaves aquiver;
a thicket of thin and whippy
willows, tightly spaced as
cigarettes in a pack”. Our
brains are not built to process
the slow-motion catastrophe
that is climate change, but
Flyn’s vignettes pepper
despair at human failures with
belief in the power of nature to
carry on, with or without us. cherd were far from “dim-
witted, cud-chewing
automaton[s]”. They had
chosen a succession of alpha
bulls and alpha cows, and
banished unsuccessful males
to the edges of the island.
When one of the herd was
dying, they would provide
what comfort they could, and
even introduced rituals to
deal with dead bodies, which
lay where they had fallen.
The Swona cows are one
example of nature’s
inextinguishable power to
carry on despite the damaging
impact of humanity. In
beautiful, evocative prose,
Flyn explores places that have
been left behind by humans,
and the ways in which nature
has reasserted itself. Flyn’s is
a truly transcontinental
adventure — from the “bings”
or slag heaps of West Lothian,
which have become anVerdun, the burial site for a
huge cache of the conflict’s
chemical weapons, the soil
has become not just poisoned,
but poison — 17 per cent
arsenic, 13 per cent zinc, 2.6
per cent lead. And when oil
factories leaked carcinogenic,
“virtually nonbiodegradable”
dioxins into the tidal strait of
Arthur Kill, Staten Island, the
few animals that managed to
adapt to this “toxic broth” areESSAYS
Tomiwa Owolade
Things I Have Withheld
by Kei Miller
Canongate £14.99 pp224
Kei Miller’s essay collection
rests on a basic faith: the
power of language to make
sense of obscure feelings.
“Each of these essays,” the
novelist and poet writes in the
introduction, “is an act of
faith, an attempt to put my
trust in words again.” In
captivatingly elegant prose,
Miller voices feelings that
have previously been left
unsaid or mumbled by him.
Watch out Left alone, cows
revert to primal instinctsThe writer who has stopped biting his tongue
When cows
go wild...
The extraordinary ways in which animals
and plants are reborn after people leave
Kei Miller tackles
taboos about race
and sex in these
gripping pieces
ALAMYThis includes, for instance,
his experiences of being
patronised in the UK and US,
such as when a British man in
the north of England asks,
after praising Miller’s poetry:
“What was it like having a
talent like that and growing
up in a place like Jamaica?” In
that moment, Miller did not
say what he wanted to say,
because he would have
“appeared rude”, and
the words he wanted
to say and ask were too
important to him to
waste in that moment.
So he leaves them
for this book. After
quoting the question
posed by the man,
Miller unravels the
assumptions that
the Caribbean is a
cultural backwater,
citing the examples
of Kamau
Brathwaite and
Derek Walcott —the effect of reading his
unchained eloquence is
exhilarating. In the man’s
eyes, Miller writes, “there
were no poets to speak of —
no one sitting at their desk, a
library of books rising behind
them”. There were instead
only “storytellers”who were “old, toothless
women who would quote the
Bible and who would read
omens in the moon”.
What unites the essays is
an emphasis on the body. Our
bodies have meanings “we
don’t always consider”, Miller
writes, and it is through our
bodies that racist, homophobic
and misogynistic ideas justify
themselves: the threatening
black male body, the filthy
homosexual body, the impure
female body. If we leave things
unsaid, only our bodies will
speak for us, and this will put
us in a position of stark
vulnerability. This fascination
with bodies is something
Miller shares with James
Baldwin, one of the main
inspirations for this book.
In fact the first essay of
the book consists of letters to
Baldwin. “James,” he writes,
“I do not think much of your
poetry, but I think everything
of your essays.” He adds that“what you had and what
I lack is an instinctive
understanding of the form”.
Miller doesn’t need to
worry. The best thing about
this book is the prose. It has a
powerfully gripping intensity.
Every sentence has something
at stake. For example, in a
remarkably moving passage,
after a young gay man has
confessed to Miller that he
was sexually abused by his
father, Miller, who is also gay,
writes: “And the thing that
was in my throat, the thing
that was anger, has now
dissolved into something else,
into a bubble of things I think
I cannot say. I reach across
and hold his hand.”
Miller’s Baillie Gifford-
shortlisted book is an
outstanding effort at tackling
experiences we would rather
not confront. The emotional
pitch is well attuned, the
words judiciously chosen.
Baldwin would be proud. cBOOKS
No holding
back The poet
and novelist
Kei MillerROBERTO RICCIUTI/GETTY IMAGES